R-TV BOX S10 PLUS – A TV Box With A Difference

R-TV BOX S10 PLUS Review

It is always exciting to see when a TV box introduces something new and innovative. The R-TV Box S10 Plus is not just a TV box, but a wireless phone charger in one. It comes with some good hardware. Now we have not seen much TV boxes for 2018 with really good hardware, and judging from the specs on the product page, I entered into this review with high hopes to an end of the high end TV box drought.

Hardware

When you look at the hardware the first thing you would see in the specifications is the CPU, which is the Rockchip RK3328 quad core Cortex A53. In thgis box even though they clocked the CPU at 1.5GHz, the RK3328 has not been able to deliver high benchmark scores in other TV boxes. The GPU, which is the ARM penta core Mali 450MP running up to 750MHz has produced some good scores in the past. However, it works best when coupled together with the Amlogic S912 CPU. It comes with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of internal storage. This a good addition to this box, however, if the CPU and GPU cannot perform at a high level the RAM and ROM will not have peak performance. It comes with single band WiFi, and no Bluetooth connectivity. This by itself can be a deal breaker for some people. The feature hardware component of this box is the wireless charging port that works great.

IO Ports

1 HDMI

4 USB (1 USB 3.0)

1 Optical audio

1 RJ45 Ethernet LAN

1 SD

1 AV

1 Wireless Charging

User Interface / Operating System

The R-TV box S10 plus, tries to capture the true essence of a modern TV box by providing the user with the following. The operating system is Android TV version 7.1.2 Nougat, and it is not rooted. In this case no root access is actually a good thing, it allows the box to have the right DRM support for Netflix to show in HD and 4K quality. The Android TV OS also by default plays YouTube in 1080p quality. It also allows for the use of Google voice search feature with the use of the included voice remote. I am not a fan of Android TV OS especially when I do not have root access, the Google play store is Android TV version of the play store. Most of your apps has to be side loaded because they are not found on Android TV play store. Android TV does not come with navigation bar and status bar.

Well it appears that there was a lot of hype about this box and there are clearly some good points about this box and some low ones. Firstly I love the wireless charging pad to the surface of the box and the included voice search remote. I like the 4GB 32 GB RAM and storage combination. I also like that this S10 plus has DRM support widevine L1 to show in HD/4K. On the low side, Netflix has a startup problem. WiFi reception is below average, and you have to use LAN port for faster speeds. It has no Bluetooth, 4K issues at 60fps, benchmark scores are low and gaming is sluggish. I miss my navigation bar and status bar in this box.